In an industry full of buzzwords, blockchain healthcare companies need to block out the noise.
Blockchain has the power to connect disparate healthcare data sets, improve the supply chain, and reduce payment and reimbursement inefficiencies. But to get the buy-in needed for this transformation, companies need to show skeptical healthcare organizations that it’s more than just the trend du jour, experts said.
“When you talk to people in healthcare about blockchain, the first reaction you often get is, ‘I don’t want Bitcoin or any of this crypto crap,'” said Pradeep Goel, CEO of Solve.Care, a company that creates a platform for customer relationship management using blockchain. “There is a non-technical audience that confuses blockchain with crypto. Crypto is a use case, not the definition, of blockchain.”
Blockchain technology allows organizations to securely share distributed, decentralized assets across a network. Once people understand the value of blockchain and how they can use it, they tend to come around, but it often takes a common goal to get the ball rolling, Goel said.
This was the case when the Synaptic Health Alliance was created in 2018 by Aetna, Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and UnitedHealth Group. The alliance sought to use blockchain technology to update provider information in health plan directories. Synaptic provides a secure infrastructure for synchronizing directory information across the different insurers.
In four years, what started as a pilot project has expanded from an initial rollout in Texas to full operation in Colorado, Florida, Michigan and New York. By the end of the year, Kyle Culver, co-founder of Syanptic Health Alliance, said the company is planning a national rollout.
“Blockchain allows us to decentralize the data set and attack the problem of who owns it,” Culver said. “We can have this a community-owned asset and then explore incentive models where it’s sustainable and fair for everyone.”
Citing data from the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, Culver said more than $2 billion is wasted by insurers managing provider data sets, and about 80% of the information is duplicative. About half of the data remains unchanged over 18 months, he said. The insurance companies needed a more efficient way to share information, so when one gets an update, it can be shared with the others, he said. More than 50% of supplier directory placements have at least one inaccuracy, according to a CMS review.
The financial incentive to change that data and the fact that it’s a community-owned asset made it an ideal use case for blockchain, Culver said. But that’s harder to find in other areas of health care, he said, noting that the industry is rarely the first adopter of many new technologies.
“It’s going to take some time for people to get more experience with these use cases and then collaborate on other systemic problems,” Culver said.
